Goodnight Saigon

by Charles Henderson

  Taking shelter again behind the concrete, the remaining few dozen passengers and eight Air Force SPs watched the C-130 race across the gravel to the main runway and then hurl itself skyward with the sudden ignition of eight jet-assist takeoff bottles mounted inside the fuselage above the wheel wells, roaring an impressive array of white and blue flames that scorched the runway.

  “Tallyho, another plane and a Jolly Green Giant,” an airman said, pointing to the horizon as a second C-130 made a similar combat approach and short-field landing. Behind it raced a CH-53D helicopter from the USAF Fifty-sixth Special Operations Unit from Nhakon Phanom Royal Thai Air Force Base, flying low and hot along the airport perimeter, heading straight for the remaining SPs and evacuees.

  “Put those people on that plane while we provide cover fire,” the master sergeant told his crew. “Once they’re aboard, we’ll fly home on the chopper.”

  As the air force C-130 carried the last passengers to Clark Air Base, the Jolly Green Giant delivered the remaining Air Force security policemen to the deck of the aircraft carrier USS Midway (CVB 41), which had now joined the growing armada of United States Navy vessels. Now, four aircraft carriers, the Midway, the USS Coral Sea (CVA 43), the USS Hancock (CVA 19), and the nuclear-powered attack carrier USS Enterprise (CVAN 65), along with the helicopter carrier and amphibious assault ship USS Okinawa (LPH 3), provided the aviation operating platform for the final chapter of the evacuation of Saigon, phase four of Operation Frequent Wind.

  THE WHITE HOUSE, WASHINGTON, DC

  EVEN BEFORE HIS 7 p.m. National Security Council meeting had convened, President Ford did not have to wait for much more input. With the deaths of two United States Marines and NVA rocket and artillery attacks closing Tan Son Nhut Airport, the President knew the end loomed only hours away. While still talking energy and economic strategy a few hours earlier, he made the decision to finally pull the plug on Ambassador Graham A. Martin and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger’s last-ditch efforts to negotiate a settlement with North Vietnam, saving Saigon from the Communists.

  They had hoped the USSR would make the difference, but that proved a pipe dream. Soviet President Leonid Ilyich Brezhnev had pattered and stalled, continually renewing American diplomats’ false hopes that somehow the Russians would pressure Hanoi into backing off. Waltzing a narrow line with Henry Kissinger’s detente initiatives, but still kowtowing to the ironfisted hardliners in the Kremlin, Brezhnev took the politically expedient course of action, doing nothing while smiling at both sides.

  However, despite the diplomats’ zeal, President Ford faced the grim reality that with each passing minute, while Graham Martin puffed smoke and flashed mirrors, the lives of thousands of people lay wagered like chips in a dangerous poker bluff. America had no hole card. No aces or kings. No flushes or straights. Not even a pair. Just a handful of nothing.

  A good poker player has to know when the bluff has backfired and his wager is spent. He has to know when to fold his hand and save the chips he still owns.

  When the men sat down for the seven o’clock meeting, President Ford simply said, “Tell Ambassador Martin that the evacuation has now transferred to military operational control. We have no choice but to send in the helicopters, get our Americans out, and try to save as many friends as we can.”

  “Should I send the signal to the Seventh Fleet to initiate phase four of the operation?” Lieutenant General Brent Scowcroft said.

  “Yes, General Scowcroft, notify the command center to send the flash message to launch,” President Ford said.

  “Anything else, sir?”

  “That’s it, Brent. Just get them out as quickly and as safely as we can. We cannot afford any more American lives lost at this late date.”

  Chapter 20

  FREQUENT WIND

  SAIGON, RVN—TUESDAY, APRIL 29

  “PUT YOUR BACKS into it, Marines!” Sergeant Duane R. Gevers jokingly shouted to Sergeant Steven T. Schuller and Corporal David E. Norman, who busily hacked at the base of a large pepper tree growing in an island in the embassy’s front parking lot.

  “Kiss my sister’s black cat’s ass,” Schuller said, resting his ax against his leg and wiping sweat from his face with the back of his arm. Dave Norman kept swinging his blade, slowly chipping away at the hardwood heart of the tree.

  “You about done with that?” Gevers said, seeing the depths of the cuts made by the two men in each side of the tree. “I’m heading out back to get the water truck. I bet I can pull it down the rest of the way. We’ll just slap the tow chain on the trunk and snap it off.”

  “Yeah, Gevers, give it a try,” Schuller said. “I’m whipped on this Paul Bunyan shit.”

  Norman kept hacking at the trunk and spoke between strokes. “Good thing we started chopping on this awhile back.”

  “Yeah, every time I got a chance I’d sneak out here and give it a few licks, hoping that Ambassador Martin didn’t see me,” Schuller said, now chopping again on the side opposite of the cut Norman had made.

  “The old man would have put our butts in a sling,” Norman said. “He didn’t want to see anything going on that made it look like we would bug out anytime soon. That’s the shits, having to come out here at night and work on cutting this tree down. No way the helicopters could ever land on this parking lot with this tree standing.”

  As the two Marines hacked at the hardwood trunk, the deafening roar and whistle of the duce-and-a-half tactical water truck’s diesel engine came from around the corner of the embassy’s main structure as Duane Gevers tromped the throttle and jammed through several gears on the big, tandem, all-wheel-drive military vehicle. Blowing the air horn at his two friends, he backed the truck close to the tree.

  Dragging a thirty-foot-long, heavy steel tow chain from the cab of the vehicle, the sergeant fastened one end of it to the truck’s rear towing rings pinned to its heavy steel frame. Norman and Schuller made several wraps around the tree trunk and then hooked the chain back into itself.

  Back in the cab, Gevers gunned the engine, honked the air horns once more, and popped the clutch on the big truck. It lurched in the air as it jumped forward, spun all eight back tires as it hit the tension on the chain, and then yanked the tree off its trunk. With the wide-spreading tree now in tow, Sergeant Gevers never slowed down, but kept the truck running and headed it to the rear of the embassy with its heavy, leafy load rolling and bucking like a roped wild steer.

  Steve Schuller and Dave Norman picked up their shirts and two axes and happened to glance at the embassy doorway where Graham Martin stood with his small dog clutched under his arm.

  “Don’t let on like you see him,” Schuller said, turning his eyes toward the ground. “He’ll have us digging that hole through the fence for him next.”

  “Hole through the fence?” Norman said, now walking with the sergeant toward the rear of the building.

  “Oh yeah, that’s the latest of his hairbrain schemes to save Saigon,” Schuller said, taking one last glance to see the ambassador still standing on the steps. “He’s decided that he needs a tunnel dug through the wall to the French embassy so he can boogie next door at his own whim and keep negotiations with the Commies alive.”

  “I wonder if he’s actually mentioned this idea to the French?” Norman said.

  “I don’t think so,” Schuller said. “If they had given him any sort of notion that they might play ball, we’d be digging a tunnel right now.”

  ROOFTOP OF THE AMERICAN EMBASSY, SAIGON

  “WE’VE GOT A problem, Major Kean,” Master Sergeant Juan “John” Valdez said to Jim Kean, the commanding officer of Company C, Marine Security Guard Battalion. Kean had arrived in Saigon from his Hong Kong headquarters shortly after Da Nang had fallen. Given the catastrophic situations that he assessed, based on his own common sense values as a Marine officer, he concluded early on, despite the confident rhetoric espoused by the embassy leadership, that South Vietnam would fall in a matter of weeks. He thought it best that he stick a
round.

  “I see it,” Kean said, seeing the high voltage electrical wires running through the radio tower on the embassy roof. “Any way we can tell if the wires are live?”

  “Lick your finger and touch one,” Valdez said sarcastically.

  “You can tell when I clip them with these bolt cutters,” Sergeant Greg Hargis said, starting up the thirty-foot-high antenna derrick.

  “Hold on,” Kean said, worried that even if the young sergeant only got a hard jolt from the electricity, it would knock him back to the roof. The three-story fall alone might kill him.

  “Sir, we have no choice,” Valdez said. “We’ve got helicopters inbound right now. We can put two, maybe three CH-53s on the parking lot and a couple of CH-46s at a time up here. But we can’t get anything on this deck until we cut all these guy wires and electrical lines and drop this antenna tower.”

  “Let’s at least stand under him,” Kean said, moving under the tower, beneath where Sergeant Hargis climbed.

  “I don’t know, sir,” Valdez said. “I think it would be best if we just let Hargis hit the deck.”

  “Nobody’s going to fall, Top,” Hargis called back, and with his leg hooked over a crosspiece on the tower, he reached for the first electrical line with the long-handled bolt cutters. “Hey, Major, look at it this way. It’s a fifty-fifty shot that it’s off.”

  Just as the wire snapped in two, the heavy steel door on the embassy roof entrance slammed. It startled the major and the master sergeantso badly that they stumbled backwards. Sergeant Hargis laughed at the sight and cut the remaining electrical wires.

  “What’s going on?” Gunnery Sergeant Bobby Schlager shouted as he and Corporal Stephen Q. Bauer walked onto the roof, intentionally slamming the steel door shut just as Hargis cut the wire.

  “Clearing out an LZ, Gunny,” Kean said. “You slammed that door on purpose, didn’t you?”

  Schlager grinned, “Oh no, sir. Just a strong coincidence. Sorry if I startled you.”

  “You guys look like shit,” Valdez said, noticing the black tinge to both men’s fair skin. “All that soot on you come from working in the burn room? Take a look in the mirror. You both have grown Hitler moustaches too.”

  Schlager pulled a handkerchief from his back pocket and wiped his nose. Then he offered the black-stained cloth to Bauer. The corporal looked at the stained handkerchief, then at the gunny, and casually pulled up his shirttail and wiped the two thick black streaks from under his nose.

  “Had to take a breather,” Schlager said, lighting a cigarette. “Just from my estimate, we have burned more than $2.5 million in small bills. I think we still have close to a million dollars left to burn.”

  “Not taking any samples are you, Gunny?” Kean said, jokingly.

  “I wish,” Schlager said. “Everything is brand-new currency, wrapped in numerical sequences, so they have the serial numbers on all this cash. Treasury will just print more bills to replace them, so it’s basically just paper and green ink we’re really burning.”

  “Timber!” Sergeant Hargis shouted like a lumberjack, cutting the last of the heavy cables that guyed the antenna tower to the roof. As the thick steel rope snapped, the derrick crashed across the black asphalt-covered flat deck covering the embassy. Working with wrenches and hammers, the Marines soon had the mast taken loose from its mounting and heaved it over the back side of the building, letting it drop on top of the pepper tree that Duane Gevers had dumped.

  “They’re already getting people lined up out front,” Kean said, looking down at the parking lot. “Choppers must be getting close. We’d better let them know that we have this pad clear and they can use it too.”

  SOUTH CHINA SEA, SOUTH OF SAIGON

  BRIGADIER GENERAL RICHARD Carey, commander of the Ninth Marine Amphibious Brigade, stood on the bridge of the USS Hancock, watching the swarm of aircraft, both fixed-wing and helicopters, filling the air from the runway decks of the five flattop ships. While phase four of Operation Frequent Wind had begun at just a few minutes before 11:00 a.m., the helicopter-borne evacuations did not get into full production until afternoon.

  Although the choppers now roared toward Saigon as the fast movers flew high cover for them, this final phase of the last act of a long war had actually begun nearly two weeks earlier as Marine Corps logisticians and operations planners began nighttime sorties into Saigon, visiting the Defense Attaché’s Office compound and the American embassy, secretly putting the pieces in place for the evacuation.

  Commanding officer of Regimental Landing Team 4, Colonel Al Gray, had even sent clandestine ground security forces ashore as early as April 25.

  While the ambassador had dragged his feet, General Homer Smith had seen the tea leaves in the bottom of the cup. Almost around the clock he had processed out evacuation loads every twenty minutes, filling many of the air force planes that flew out of Tan Son Nhut nonstop. Each night, as the South Vietnamese National Police sounded a curfew, thus stopping the transit of passengers from the DAO, now nicknamed Dodge City, to Tan Son Nhut. As a result of the curfew, anywhere from two hundred to six hundred South Vietnamese evacuees wandered the halls and grounds of Dodge City until morning.

  As the days moved to the weekend and throngs of South Vietnamese people frantically crowded around the DAO compound, as well as around the United States Embassy, trying to obtain tickets out of Saigon on the evacuation flights, Colonel Gray met with General Smith and agreed that at least a platoon of Marines at Dodge City to help maintain security might prevent any potential disasters. Clearly, as the obvious end of the current Saigon drew nearer, panic began to overtake the heretofore well-behaved crowds, and now they began to push hard in desperation.

  On Friday afternoon, helicopters delivered Third Platoon, Company C, First Battalion, Ninth Marine Regiment to Dodge City. Under the leadership of platoon commander, First Lieutenant Bruce P. Thompson-Bowers, the Marines dressed in civilian clothes so that they would not draw attention to themselves as a military force or incite protests from the PRG that America now violated the Paris Accords.

  A favorite response by many of the Marines whenever anyone might raise the question of the Paris Accords was, “What are they going to do? Shave our heads and send us to Vietnam?” The diplomats’ deep concern of possibly violating the agreement that had clearly meant little more than toilet paper to the Communists often raised the ire of the Marines. To these soldiers of the sea, any feared consequences of violations of the Paris Accords seemed ridiculous. The leathernecks would rather have had their helicopters headed into Hanoi to assault the heart of the Communist leadership than to execute a plan that in their majority opinion constituted little more than quitting and running. They took the pill bitterly.

  As the weekend passed and Saigon stood surrounded, Al Gray consulted with embassy officials and dispatched a similar platoon of Marines to assist with security at that site too. When the first flight of helicopters landed on the roof and the parking lot, armed and uniformed Marines took up their positions within the compound on what remained of American soil in South Vietnam.

  ROOFTOP OF THE AMERICAN EMBASSY, SAIGON

  “DAMN IT, GET down!” David Norman shouted to Corporal Stephen Bauer, who had emerged from the open ladder well door followed by several of the regimental landing team Marines. They immediately hit the deck and scrambled to stacks of sandbags where the embassy Marines had built firing positions to cover the helicopters during landing, loading, and launching.

  “What’s going on?” Bauer called back to him.

  “Cowboys!” Norman said just as a spray of automatic fire danced across the rooftop. “I think I have him spotted, but every time I raise up for a shot, he hoses down the area.”

  “Can we open fire on these guys?” one of the regimental Marines shouted.

  “If you don’t have a trigger lock on your rifle, I suggest you use it,” Norman answered. “I think this cowboy’s got some friends working with him too. The last forty-six that landed here drew
a bunch of rifle fire, and one guy couldn’t pump out that many rounds.”

  Just as Corporal Norman had made his comments, the beating wings of another inbound CH-46 echoed across the compound. The aircraft raced over the treetops and then pulled to a hover over the embassy roof and began a descent.

  Suddenly bullets began pinging across the helicopter platform and dinged through the chopper’s skin. Norman, who had lain at the end of the rooftop, looked up and saw the pilot’s eyes opened wide and his mouth moving fast, as though he had yelled over his flight helmet’s boom microphone at someone.

  Seeing the pilot’s alarmed expression, Norman raised himself above the sandbags and began shooting his rifle rapid fire at the building inside which he had concluded the cowboy hid. As the corporal opened fire, the other Marines joined him, focusing their fire onto the same upper-floor target area.

  An embassy staff officer crouched in the doorway of the stairwell, leading a string of outbound passengers for the waiting helicopter. They had come to the embassy via the armed shuttle buses, driven by the RLT-4 Marines, on a set of routes that they called trails, interconnecting pickup points in the heart of Saigon for the departing American citizens. Earlier in the afternoon, Ambassador Martin had announced that all American citizens must now leave South Vietnam, by order of President Ford.

  The fleet Marines had devised the network of trails that extended across Saigon and connected the embassy with the DAO compound. The routes had names like Santa Fe, Oregon, and Texas trails. In classic Western fashion, the armed Marines rode the trails, picking up Americans as they made their runs from Dodge City to the embassy and back, dodging through sporadic small-arms ambushes laid by Saigon’s bushwhacking cowboys.

  By sunset, the city had turned to a seething pit of entrapped and panic-stricken citizens. Tens of thousands of deserting ARVN soldiers now rampaged the streets, shooting, looting, raping, and killing. They knew they faced their end, and with no way out, they struck at the very heart of what they had for many years protected with their lives.